B (4:49)
It's great to be here, and I recognize some faces from when I was here last year. For those of you who were at the talk a year ago, you'll see a relationship between that conversation and much of what I'm talking about here. Hopefully not too much overlap. I'm also here this week. What Claire didn't say to you is that I'm also here this week to run a dissertation workshop with the students in the Gender at the Gender Institute. And this was something we confabbed last year when I was here in part because I had given a talk that was something about knowing what we mean, that really thought about writing or habits of writing, and about the problem of coming in, of actually inhabiting the aspiration of your own critical theory. So knowing what we mean when we say that all subjects are contingent is very different from the way that a lot of us write as academic subjects. We tend to forget our own historical contingency. We tend to forget that knowledge is always partial. I mean, we say it, but then we have to write as academic subjects to are constantly performing our knowing right. You know, this talk is related to that in a certain sense. And I chose it because it's a chapter that has been highly revised from earlier publications. And I mean, I chose it specifically so that we can do something with it for Those of you who are taking the dissertation workshop, because I many years ago published something called Object Lessons on Men, Masculinity and the Sign of Women in Signs. And in that paper, which was the first time I used the phrase object lessons, which is now the title of the book project, I was thinking about how gender, how women had been displaced by gender in the US Academy in particular, as a way to signify the field. But that essay really focused on one piece of that displacement, which was the study of men and masculinity. And it spent its time, spent my time in that essay tracing out how men and masculinity had become objects of study that challenged the centrality of women and all the debates about that which go back to the late 80s and the early 90s. In a later reiteration of that same conversation for a book I edited called Women's Studies of On Its Own, I then used the notion of the progress of gender to start to reframe that earlier piece and to think about how because a few years later all these programs in the US were changing their names from women's studies to gender studies or an even odder locution, Women's and Gender Studies. And that locution is very strange since when I made my way into feminist studies and I have to admit 70s, women and gender were synonymous. When you said gender, you meant women. They were not disarticulated, but the course of my own academic career through graduate school, et cetera. And then my work as professor demonstrate, you know, it started to diverge. And the divergence happened first or often around, as I was saying, men and masculinity, but then also around sexuality, such that gender in some programs, when they call it women's and gender studies, they mean sexuality studies, they mean queer studies now increasingly can also mean trans studies and intersect so that the word gender has the capacity now to mean almost everything except women in that locution. So in my middle age, which is what these classes signify, I'm trying to figure out how it is that a term is that I that was so central to the way in which my first allegiances and critical practices were organized around, which meant women, gender and women now means not women and is in this scene of proliferation. And I thought that the also that the iteration and the transformation of the essays as I've been thinking about about it over time would be useful for the dissertation workshop. Because many of us write the long process of writing a dissertation has you in different temporalities. At least that's how I think about it and about your own intellectual subjectivity. When you come into a program, you kind of think in one way that can be transformed. You might start writing on something, but then you do a bunch of reading and something else. And when you enter the chapter again, you're interested in everything you weren't interested in before. And then you have that horrible sense of how do you bring what you wrote before into play with what you're writing now? And if you're like me, you don't want to throw any words away because you suffered over them. And so you've been trying to figure out how to mesh these disparate temporalities. And so I thought that since we were going to spend a lot of time. These are the folks in the front row here talking about our anxiety around our own writing, that it would be good if I performed one of my ways out of it, which is just to keep writing the same essay over and over until you finally are sick of it, which I now am. And so the book will be done soon. And that's the way it goes. So this chapter has four part. Oh, and the other problem of writing something for like 10 or 15 years of project is that it gets longer and longer. So this chapter has four parts. I'm going to read from three of them very truncatedly, and sort of just talk my way through another. But the four parts, there's a little introduction. Part one is called Transferential Objects. Part two is called what Was Women, Meaning the category of women. Part three is called Critical Realism. And part four is called When Gender Fails, meaning gender, the category. And in calling this learning, to cite Judith Butler, I mean, it is, in a sense, a lure. But I'm trying to think. As you'll see, this chapter is about the disciplinary apparatus within which the relation to our objects of study is formed. I'm making an argument that the object of study and the way that we cultivate our relationship to it is a disciplinary practice, not a political one, in the way that feminist knowledge often approaches it. It has a politics, but it is not the same thing as the political relationship to the phenomenon that the object itself wants to cite. Hopefully, that will become clearer as I talk. But from my point of view, the institutionalization of women or gender studies or feminist knowledges in the university has institutionalized a particular, particular understanding of the political and of its political relation to the world. And that is. It's that political understanding that is its disciplinary apparatus. So unlike people who say that the problem with the institutionalization of feminism is that it has lost its politics. I want to say that it's a certain version of politics that has been institutionalized in the disciplinary apparatus. And that's what I would like us to sort of think about. The other thing, let me just emphasize, is that the book, just like the chapter, is really about the US University. And one of the important things that the transnational, one of the ways in which the transnational puts a great deal of pressure on people like me who are Americanists, is to try to understand the specificity of the US context. Now that specificity is also, I mean, it's very interesting in context like this, where the critical currency of, say, Judith Butler, you know, as part of her position in the U.S. academy and the U.S. academy's position as a hegemonic knowledge formation globally, you know, what that means is that ideas and conversations travel. You inherit Judith Butler in a particular kind of way, but the situatedness of her discourse in the US academy may be less apparent as it travels. Certainly she doesn't write with its how it operates for her. I mean, as a philosopher in particular, we get a lot of dehistorization. But I'm interested in our conversation to find out how much of what I'm talking about about the US resonates here, how much it is absolutely inadequate or, you know, doesn't meet divergent from the way that gender and the relation between gender and women operates in the UK or in the. I know some people are working on other global sites too. So this chapter traces the after life of one particular object, women, meaning the category of women whose well rehearsed failure to remain conceptually coherent and universally referential for all women within the field domain of women's studies has inaugurated a turn toward a host of new investments organized increasingly under the sign of gender. While many academic feminists in the US of my generation remember when gender was a synonym for women, the term has come to correlate much of what the category of women is said to exclude, as I've already said from men masculinity and queer sexualities, which was the first movement to now trans and intersections, identities and analysis, which is the second movement of this transformation. Hence, one now encounters gender as a means both to describe the constraints of heteropatriarchal social formation and to figure subversion, disidentification and dissonance in identity attachments in everyday life. It operates as a coordinate for approaching the complexities of social subordination, what I think of as college kind of classic intersectionality and as an analytic for traveling or for unraveling I should say, a wide range of discursive economic and geopolitical processes. It functions as well to denote emergent identities and is implicated in, if not central to, the practices and politics of contemporary social movements of various kinds. In serving as a referent for a range of objects of study and analytic practices, as well as the subjects that might be said to mirror them, Gender as a category performs the optimistic hope that a relation of compatibility, if not consistency, between critical practice and field domain can finally be one, and that is in reference to changing the name of the field from Women's Studies to gender studies in the US but why is the object of study the animating scene of the field's political investment? Why is that? The name change has created enormous controversy and debate in the US for the last 20 years. Why is the name as the symbol? Why the name as the symbolic practice if not a critical enactment of justice? And why the implicit, concomitant belief that gender, unlike women, will be a match for everything that we want? For as these questions insinuate, I aim neither to refuse nor to confirm gender as the figure for the field's contemporary reconfiguration, but to explore the distinctly disciplinary implications of what I would call a field imaginary that uses objects and analytics of study as the means to define value and enact its commitment to justice. By calling this talk Learning how, to cite Genevieve Butler, I want to reference the power of the critical habits that we learn as the means to write our belonging to the field. In this sense, I am less interested in Butler per se or her work than in the field imaginary in which we learn to perform our relation to critical practice as a form of political agency. Now, the truth is that Judith Butler's work has taught us in many ways to do this. I mean, each iteration of her project seeks to answer the critiques that have come before it. Each seeks to, you know, to us, to go beyond and to have the proper way to think the problem of the political that we inhabit. And she has a great investment in critique as the way to do that. So it's not incidental. It's not just her critical capital, but also the way that her work has figured for us, for many people. And it's the capacity of continually elaborating your project in the hopes of having a theoretical formulation of what, of how to resolve the problems that you face. All this, even as she constantly says, you know, everything is contingent, knowing is partial, et cetera. But nonetheless, I think the body of the work does move in that direction, toward trying to have theoretical resolution to the problems that it makes so. Part 1 Transferential objects in Women's Studies on the Edge, a special issue of differences published in 1999. Leora Oslander opens the volume by considering the horizons of study offered by gender. Her essay, which is titled do women's feminists men's lesbian and gay queer studies equal? Gender Studies? Offers an affirmative answer to the question the title poses, finding in the move from women to gender studies an intellectual expansion such that, quote, the study of masculinity, feminist gender studies, and gay, lesbian, and queer studies each have an equal voice. Positioned as the volume's optimistic answer to the dystopic diagnosis of Wendy Brown's controversial the Impossibility of Women's Studies, which is also in that volume, Oslander's keynote offers assurance that the Edge can become an intellectually cutting and politically capacious one when gender reconfigures the priority of women. Now when I say these words, gender and women, remember I'm talking about their status as a category. Now I'll just kind of do this. As the mathematical formula of the title suggests, gender accumulates its critical capital by coming after after the fact, so called, of women's categorical failure, after differences among women riveted the field, after the public political crisis of feminism, after the field's contentious battle over men, after the identity attachments of gay and lesbian studies, after the deconstructive invocations of queer in being both destination and summation, gender thus signifies and exceeds its constituent parts. In large part, Oslander's essay details the routes by which gender emerged to claim oversight and priority, the hope it carried with it, and the worry its progress raised along the way. First, the hope, as she tells it, the center for Gender Studies at her institution, the University of Chicago, was a collaboration between scholars in women's studies and those working within gay and lesbian studies. For reasons both intellectual and institutional, the center's founders rejected the idea of establishing separate programs, taking gender studies as the name as a way to link and expand both women's studies and gay and lesbian studies. For women's studies in particular, as she tells it, this would entail attention to a range of issues that had not been sufficiently foregrounded by what Oslander calls the women's studies paradigm. That paradigm was centered, initially, she writes, on documenting women's experiences and discovering their past actions in context that emphasize women's difference from men, unquote. This is familiar, right? Its dissolution was the consequence of four developments. As she maps it and these are familiar, and Claire Hemings has written about them. You know, about the narrative of this dissolution in telling feminist stories. First of all, the demise of universal woman wrought by critical attention to hierarchies of race, sexuality and class. Second, the turn towards gender as a relational system. There you might think about the work of Joan Scott or a variety of people that said that just to study women outside of the context of gender as a relational structure doesn't tell us much. Three, the emergence of men and masculinity as legitimate objects of feminist inquiry. And four, the rise of critical theory and post structuralist thought. The hope then for the use of gender was that it would reorganize the field in the aftermath of the failure of the founding paradigm by bringing issues of sexuality, sexual desire and sexual orientation into critical contact with the study of women's differences. Gender as a relational system, masculinity and emergent theoretical explorations of language, subjectivity and power. So expansion, equal voice and political. Greater political capacity on one hand. And then the worries. Auslander cites several worries about what gender, what the move to gender, what might be problematic about it, including, as she puts the potential eclipse of distinctly political feminist political commitments, such as, you know, the focus on childcare, reproductive rights, you know, those major feminist issues. The second, the status of race as a category of analysis and the potential whiteness of gender studies. So there's a certain worry that to move in a field committed to intersectionality, to the frame of gender, is to occlude these, especially race. And it's especially the occlusion of race and not sexuality, because of the way that gender is also cultivating a referent for sexuality. Right. That's at stake here. And three, the challenge of full interdisciplinarity as represented by the inclusion of the natural and physical sciences and gender studies projects and programs. The familiarity of these individual issues actually harkens back to some of the very impulses that Oslander says sent the field from women to gender in the first place. I mean, after all, the centrality of the problem of the inclusion of race with the category of women was one reason that people thought about moving away from women. And yet, if the turn to gender brings with it that same problem. Right. Nonetheless, she insists, after going through a long conversation about this, that whatever its difficulties, gender studies is the most powerful model of research we have. My faith in it is not merely an abstract faith. The paradigm has enabled both individual and collective projects that would have been impossible without it. Faith as the relational sign of gender's Progress is of course a fascination rhetorical term, all the more significant given Oslander's assertion that it is not an abstract but a realized one. Still, sustaining faith in an analytic paradigm as a means for pursuing equal voice or justice in your relation to your object of study always entails something of an abstraction, which raises in turn the issue of what constitutes evidence both of the word link, of the problem and of its transformative solutions. Oslander's assertion that at her institution gender has enabled collaborations impossible without its governance as the field's organizing science is not, of course, for me to dispute. But I want to pause over the political agency that gender is made here to stand for. For if an earlier faith in women's paradigmatic potential reveals more about women's differences in the agencies of capitalism, empire, and heteronormativity than the inaugurating belief in women as a sign for collective transformation, certainly then the turn to gender perpetuates even as it shifts the focus of the founding belief as now gender becomes the critical term to have faith in right in order to, as Oslander puts it, think better and harder about the world world and its troubles, as well as to imagine how it might be different. The contemporary lure of gender must be understood as more than a simple castigation of women through substitution or displacement, given that gender is here made to bear the promise that women once stood for. And it is this relationship of aspiration and optimism, of attachment and belief, or what I'll say gender calls faith and of knowledge, then the knowledge that will cultivate in her progress narrative around gender as a political agency, right that is at stake in the field imaginary, that governs the constellation of women and gender studies in the US both in the late 90s and, I would argue, today. And that's sort of the central piece of what I want to say about the progress of gender shifts the object on which the faith is based, but not the faith that underwrote the founding paradigm of women's studies, right? Which is that your name, your object of study, and the analytic practice can cohere to guarantee the political agency that you seek to have, the political agency you seek for critical practice to have in the world. So Part two what was women, as we all know, the most pervasive critique that now attends the narrative of the failure of the founding paradigm. Indeed, the very critique that founds the paradigm as essentially failed is its occlusion of differences among women. This occlusion tends to be narrated in one of two ways, by casting post structuralist deconstructions of the category of women and race and sexuality based critiques of the categories, universalist deployments as a collaborative endeavor that retrospectively undoes the security of an earlier composite women. And Claire's project that I've learned a lot from talks about the periodization of the eclipse of women. So that you know that a lot of the narratives that Claire has read shows that how race, particularly race and sexuality based critiques are marked as is it the 70s or the 80s? And then post structuralism. 80s and then post structuralism is the 90s. And so that there's this periodization in other narratives that I've been looking at, more recent narratives are some from the U.S. academy. I'm not sure that the period, it seems like they're condensed or they're often thought to overlap. And Claire and I were talking about this earlier today, and some of it just depends on what story, what, what attachment people are trying to come up with by the end of their story, whether or not they make a temporal lag between post structuralism and race and sexuality critiques, or whether or not they fuse them in order to have some kind of transcendent moment. So I have to work that out. But nonetheless, the consequence, of course, is that the consensus story of the failure of the women's studies paradigm of women moves with often very little citational sweat to its celebrated conclusion that in its early reliance on women, scholarship in the field tended to assume, as Oslander puts it, that differences among women were less salient than their common sex. For Oslander, this conclusion presents itself as a move towards justice, righting the wrong of the faulty universalism that women is said to engender, and revamping the narrative of the field as a tale of redemption. First, for the field which can now properly locate racism and heterosexism in the past, such that the present is figured as a scene of progress that opens to a non complicitous future. And second, actually for the very women, straight, white, middle class, Western, and most often quintessentially American, at least in the narratives I'm looking at whose hegemony was under assault by the critique launched against their universalizing use of women, the slanter distinction that I just made in the previous sentence between a critique of the category and a critique of the use of the category is crucial, I think, to understanding the role that women now plays in the pedagogy of process of progress that generates the future of the field. Oslander's language is especially instructive here as it reflects a pervasive habit across the study of women, gender, and sexuality to consign the agency of women's failure to the category itself. The crisis, after all, is called the crisis of the category of women, she writes, as research was done on the past and present of women's lives as attempts were made to theorize women's domination as scholars expanded their reach across the globe and it became clear that the category of woman and then of women in the plural, obscured important differences. The category obscured note the grammatical construction. Not that the use of the category obscured or that the critical apparatus at hand was no match for addressing the densities of the historical situations in which women became legible as a social entity in the the first place, or that the disparate forms of minoritization that attended women's global status as a subordinated majority overpowered the universalizing and retrospectively arrogant hope to speak to and for all women. Or that the pedagogical insistence of the field on the transformative ground of the personal was unprepared for the institutionalization of racial and sexual norms that would quickly and radically narrow the composition of the audience that academic feminism addressed, or that the very social movement that was said to inaugurate the field would bring with it a political imaginary that was temporally and geopolitically bound, along with the political vocabulary that had already universalized the conditions of its presence of social movement in the US into an increasingly platform ill of left agendas for social change. Not then that the difficulties encountered were a consequence of the complexities critical, methodological, historical, geopolitical, linguistic and ideational of deciphering the entity that the field had committed itself to, such that the very credibility of the field was staked to a calculus of justice as the measure of its success or its failure. I am not saying that no one noted or understood these formidable and mind numbing problems, they certainly and repeatedly did. But in the shorthand that Oslander and others now use, and yes, I admit I have used it too, the field narrative takes a shortcut to the future, condemning the category in order to keep open the possibility that critical practice can be free from the social and historical weight that attends it, and that a relation of justice can still be achieved. This on its own is an amazing transference, and that's a term I'm interested in using. Essentializing the category, not just what it refers to. The performative force of the category obscured thus displaces a range of critical difficulties onto the faulty complicity of the category itself. In this the progress narratives assessment from the referential sign of women can offer the field a fantastic escape from what the category's failure is thought to racism, heterosexism, universalism, and exclusion. What happens in this context, then, to the challenges made by, as Auslander puts it, women of color and lesbians to the universalism of women? Or more to the point, from what location is their critique of the category of women made? After all, in no story of the field's history that I've ever encountered is their critique taken as a remaking of the founding paradigm. Instead, it is made to function as evidence of the essentialized nature of the women's catastrophic categorical failure. This places race and sexuality based challenges to women's universalism outside the founding paradigm, in the very gesture that the citation of such critiques is presented as evidence of their vitality to the field. Paradoxically, then, under the auspices of the progress narrative, the critique by women of color and lesbians is actually used to preserve, it seems to me, the founding paradigm as the exclusive domain of privileged women by defining the category solely as the locus of their privilege. This categorical essentialism, if you will, tends to situate critiques by women of color and lesbians as ends in themselves and not as a powerful critical investment in the possibility of making women adequate to the political aspiration that the founding paradigm ascribed to it. On what terms do we come to read the words work of critique as a matter of disidentification alone? As if the massive effort by women of color and lesbians to change the representational dispensation of women was expended with no interest at all in changing the calculus of who was and who was not included in it? Is it really possible that the critique of women's exclusion was not marshaled as a political struggle over inclusion, which is to say as a battle perceived precisely by women of color and lesbians to be included in the referential scope and historical purview of the field's exploration and idealization of women? The idea now that only those who came to be privileged by the exclusionary effects of women had an investment in women as a political unity is willfully ludicrous, it seems to me, enabling as it does, a totalizing misrecognition of what such critiques were were marshaled to do to fulfill the aspiration of women as a political unity? I want to emphasize this last phrase, political unity, in order to put pressure on our understanding of the political intensity and density of the universalizing gestures that underwrote women, which disappear when the critique of the category of Women and the critique of the deployment of the category are wholly converged. An important case to consider in this context is the tradition of standpoint theory, which sought to construct an anti essentialist understanding of the epistemological and political ground for feminism's deployment of women. Scholars thus purposely, at times rigorously resisted the idea that women's political unity could ever be assumed in advance, approaching it instead as a political achievement. In this regard, women represented a historical emergence, not a natural unity, and its political capacity was contingent to varying degrees, on the analytic force derived from feminism itself. This is very different than thinking that the category of women assumed common sex in an essentialization of the category, you know, of what women stood for, of women as a group, you know, as though they were a natural community to begin with. I think standpoint theory is currently undervalued in what it was trying to do, which was to deessentialize and figure out how the position from which feminism could articulate its critique of the world had a relation to women's experience. But that experience wasn't determined in advance, you know, and even that language sounds like, you know, post structuralism, right? That all the credit post structuralism gets for all the smart things that feminism does is also really irritating, you know. Nancy Hartsock followed, for instance, Marx's formulation of the proletariat to develop this line of inquiry, crafting the everyday labor of women as a realm of political activity that could constitute what she called the feminist standpoint. Catherine MacKinnon took women to be the consequence of patriarchal gender to such an extent that feminism was the sole means by which any interpretive vantage on them could be achieved. Patricia Hill Collins now definitive work situated the experience of black women as the standpoint that would be rendered theoretically important by black feminist intellectual work. In her project, the political agency is black feminist intellectual work, not black women's experience per se. It's an important distinction, to be sure. There was scholarship that trafficked in a essentialist and mythological formulations of women. And even the work I have cited was not without error in its attempt to sustain social constructionist understandings of women's experience as the ground for emancipatory analysis. The point I am making though is this, that to the extent that the progress narrative of gender situates the critique of the category of women as outside the struggle to produce and evince the political agency of women, it has not only misunderstood the founding paradigm, but consecrated its self defining political superiority precisely by doing so. One need only look at the closing exhortation In Hortense Spiller's 1983 essay a small Drama of Words to see how the critique of universalist deployments of women is made on behalf of the aspirations of the founding paradigm, not outside it, or as a means to bring its use to an end. She writes, in Putting Afoot A New Woman, we delight in remembering that half the world is female. We are challenged, however, when we recall that more than half the globe's female half is yellow, brown, black and red. I do not mean to suggest, she says, that white is an addendum, but rather only an angle on a thematic vision whose agents have the radical chance to help orchestrate the dialectics of a global new woman. As I see it, the goal is a global restoration and dispersal of power, unquote. All of this is to say, then, that the political purchase of the consensus narrative that renders women's differences the end of the category of women is designed to claim the presence of political complicity and sustain the field's self defining emancipatory capacity. The conceptual leaps involved here are extensive and extensive, as we are led to believe that every commitment to women as the horizon of the field can only be interpreted as an investment in the category's universalizing effects. Hence, scholarship conducted under the sign of women is taken to assume, as Oslander writes, and now we have a new universal to counter an old one, that differences among women, quote, were less salient than their common sex. But to seek to discern the commonality of common sex is not necessarily to believe that differences were or are less salient. On the contrary, it may be precisely because of the saliency of differences that one seeks to produce with great political passion a discourse, an organizational program of common sex, to the cast the investment in the founding paradigm this way, right? As one that was hoping, in the face of differences, to think about common sex, not to think about common sex as a refusal to recognize differences. And that's to think about what people's investment in feminism was when they were writing, especially in the 70s and early 80s. It is also to refuse, and I want to say two important things. It's to refuse to think about it this way is to refuse the now sedimented equation between the aspiration to wield women as a political unity and racism and homophobia. You know, all my undergraduates take the category of women to be a racist and homophobic one. That's partially what I'm arguing with, right, and that the only way that you can escape racism and homophobia is to particularize so that the whole history of the struggle over the category is rendered mute by the category's failure. And two, you know what comes with this is the consequential assumption that the flight from the category of women is the necessary political resolution to racism and homophobia. There may be much more to be gained by paying attention to the operations of sex, sameness, and difference in specific instances, so as to explore precisely when women's deployment was or is a political aspiration to overcome differences, as in the Spillers quote I gave you, and when it is a refusal to grant those differences their analytic or political due. This would allow a far more nuanced taxonomy of racism in the history of the field to emerge, one that could, for instance, I think, calibrate the political elasticity and subjective complexity of white racial formation in ways that exceed the repeated description of racism to the universalizing blindness of normative whiteness. Indeed, as the complex negotiation of differences in the US might show, especially in the past 30 years, the generic logic of unmarked universalism is not the only means by white by which white hegemony is secured. It can arrive cloaked in the discourse of diversity, multiculturalism, or difference itself, and even feature as its author the racialized or sexualized subject who is now rather ruthlessly bound to appearing only in that role. In these contexts, both critical and cultural, the left political aspiration for difference to lead to the resolution of inequality and hierarchy is undone by the cultural struggle waged over its meaning in the complex cultural processes of historical change itself. In other words, and I don't know if this is going to be clearer, if the use of women yielded too much sameness at the price of obscuring differences within identity. The turn to center differences has brought with it its own problems, not the least of which is an impoverished equation that to talk about differences is to be against even outside of universalism and its exclusivist effects. Indeed, nearly every critique of the exclusivist occupations of women reassures its readers, or nearly every that attending to differences is the means to overcome exclusion. But the political desire to transcend exclusion altogether is a universalist desire, different, to be sure, from the the metaphysical inscriptions arising from US feminism's historical convergence with Western humanism, but committed nonetheless to the process or the prospect of endless inclusion. This is the promise and, I would add, the irresolvable contradiction of the discourse of intersectionality, which is steeped in a rhetorical rejection of universalism through its critique of singular axes of identity and power, but consecrated by a universalist desire to found a Comprehensive, non exclusive articulation of the workings of power. I'm interested in what would it mean if we thought about intersectionality's own universalist desire, so that we're not constantly just pointing to where universalism comes up. And I'm not against universalist desire. I think that you can't do politics without it and you know, so that these easy gestures in which we think we can dismiss it. Well, like I said, they're easy in order to do it. While much more can be said about the progress narrative and intersectionality is a contemporary progress narrative is now used to write. The point I want to emphasize is that identity and difference are not opposed to one another. Their relation is not analogous to the terms by which universalism is set against particularity and difference or the way inclusion is taken as the opposite of exclusion. While there is enormous comfort in the belief that any critical practice that eventuates in political complicity was invested in it all along. And by that I'm talking about how we now, you know, by rewriting the problem of women as the failure of the category that believed in common sex at the expense of being interested in difference, by believing that story that we now tell, that no one was interested, indifference when they spoke about women. Right. We get to believe that there was. That people were complicit from the get go. And now that allows us to regenerate our faith, to use all slander in a critical practice that we will come up with that won't also be complicitous. Or at least that's part of the structure of the progress narrative, regardless of whether we turn to gender or intersectionality or what I'm going to talk about briefly in the next section, interdisciplinarity. The field has many progress narratives, in part because the disciplinary apparatus of the field produces progress as the political imaginary in which we operate. Seems to me. So where does this lead or leave us? Am I saying then that we must refuse the progress narrative by working harder to grasp the complexity, or especially the progress narrative of gender by working harder to grasp the complexity of women, to think of it less as a gender identity than as a political aspiration, one that once functioned to name the field's investment in translating feminism from the realm of social movement to academic inquiry? You know, well, as much as that's the reading I gave you, that is not on its own going to undo the progress narrative precisely because it's easy to say that if we do just get beyond progress narrative will actually get somewhere. You see what I'm saying that, you know, this gesture of trying to figure out how to resolve the problem in the way that critical practice now poses it, such that we keep having faith that critical practice is the domain of that resolution. That's the imaginary of the political progress that I'm trying to get at. So even though I really want us to reclaim the complexity of the category of women and scholarship in the field, and I really want people to try to understand the context of contestation around the category of women in the 60s and 70s, especially and early 80s, especially in the U.S. such that, you know, women doesn't remain the exclusivist domain of privilege, you know, so that we can actually write the critiques of by women of color and lesbians into the field as part of its founding formulation. And the crisis that is created by the income pac, what the incommensurability, what women people wanted from women and what it was able to yield like, and deal with that, that's not going to be enough. Like, that won't solve the problems I'm talking about. That could just turn into another progress narrative. Right? And we'll get beyond it and then we'll figure out how to everything to be okay today. So partly this is because what I'm trying to diagnose in this chapter is the disciplinary structure within which the progress narrative sits. Okay? So it's not external to the field. It's now a disciplinary apparatus. So the third section is called Critical Realism, and I'm not going to have time to read it to you. Aren't you happy? No, but. So let me just see if I can tell you a little bit about it, and then I'll go to my last section about when gender fails. So this section of the paper looks at the progress narrative that's invested in intersection or interdisciplinarity, partly because what I wanted to do was to move away from an object of study and look at how the progress narrative of the field is inhabited in something that seems, you know, fairly apolitical, say. Right. Interdisciplinarity, though there's a great deal of political aspiration attached to it. And in particular, I look at this essay by Judith Allen and Sally Kitsch that's called discipline by the disciplines, the need for an Interdisciplinary Research Mission in Women's Studies. It's cited in a lot of conversations in women's studies and gender studies in the US and in it it's saying that the field needs to move away from being the institutional form of women's studies studies, needs to be departmental, have your own faculty lines, et cetera. Because that's the only way to achieve true interdisciplinarity. And true interdisciplinarity will allow the field to fulfill its feminist aspirations in order to have a comprehensive knowledge project that's not partial in the way that the disciplines are. And so much of the essay is trying to set up that conversation. And the example they take is violence against women. And why no discipline would be adequate to dealing with the problem of violence against women. And they use that to say that that's why you need an interdisciplinary structure, a set of research mission. And because you need that in order to deal with violence against women, you need to have a departmental structure with your own faculty lines, money for a Nice Instinct Institute, PhD programs, et cetera. And what I'm interested in is how this, how the institutional product, the institutionalization and institutional form is connected in their essay with the political capacity of the field to do justice to the problem of violence against women. Right. So. And I show how that seems to me to be very symptomatic of this disciplinary predisposition. And it's not pre. This disciplinary disposition of the field that produces its institutional forms, relation to object of study, and even its departmental or programmatic status in relationship to the question of justice and justice to women. That's why the title of this chapter is called Doing justice with Objects. Right, or with the Entities. So I have a lot to say about the mythology that the field has around interdisciplinarity as giving us something that the disciplines don't, about the partiality of disciplines and the greater complexity of interdisciplinarity and all that. But I'm not going to do that because of time. I'm just going to read to you. Well, I won't even do that. I'll just tell you when I say Critical realism, the reason that that section is called critical Realism is what I'm trying to get at is the idea that. Critical practice can produce and reflect and do justice to the relations of the social world that we use critical practice to study. And often so that in the kitchen, in their argument, when they take up violence against women as their object, I take that as a critical realist move, right? Because they're saying that the institutional apparatus around this object of study is the only way to transform that object of study as it exists, as a problem, as a social problem in the world. They don't take responsibility for their constitution of violence against women as their privileged object of study. So for them, it's not an object of study. It's the problem of violence against women in the world. And in that. That's a kind of critical realist move where the critical. The structure of the disciplinary apparatus, of the critical practice is taken as the same thing, as the problem, as it exists in the world. Now, you have to recognize that I am trained as a humanist. And so there's discourse mediates for me the relation to the real. So the. The reference for the phenomenon is not the same thing as the phenomenon. Okay, we can argue, and that's a disciplinary habit, but in women's studies, many times, so the relation to the category becomes the relation to the object. We can get rid of the category and then we get rid of that problem. And that's sort of what I'm trying to diagnose here. Women's studies is not alone in doing this. Right? It is not alone in constructing a disciplinary apparatus contingent on the political demand that inaugurated its existence as a field of study. Every knowledge project that takes itself as pursuing a field formation commensurate with its political needs is bound up in generating a disciplinary apparatus that can produce, protect and sustain its political imaginary. And that's why the bigger book from. From which this is drawn has chapters on American Studies, on the intersection between feminism and queer theory, on queer theory itself, and on intersectionality, and on ethnic studies, on these different domains that take as the self definition, their political capacity and their political project that define themselves as different from the traditional disciplines because of their political commitment. So that's what I'm interested in. And the US Identity knowledges all have that history. I know that's not true everywhere, right? I know that. I've heard people talk in Eastern Europe about gender. Its status is not necessarily having that connect. They're having to produce the connection to social movement as a different way of thinking about its own historicity. If I sound critical then of this, of this discipline apparatus, not because I'm seeking a political imaginary free from disciplinarity, or conversely, because I want an institutional project free from politics. I don't think there's such a thing as either. But I am trying to emphasize how the progress narrative that is intrinsic to many fields operates as a cover story for the very disciplinarity that they incite and perform. First, on their objects of study and their analysis that it commits itself to, and second, on the practitioners, us, who earn our credibility by reproducing the assumptions, convergences and effective relations that the field begets in calling the structure of this disciplinarity critical realism. I mean to foreground how the transferential relations which underwrite the progress narrative in many of its forms are contingent on a set of conflations between the dispositions and deplorable of critical practice on one hand, and the complexities and political emergencies of social life on the others on the other. Hands, five hands here. These conflations arise not from analytical mistakes, no matter how decisively the pedagogy of critical realism has taught us otherwise, such that we work to correct an analysis or to correct our object of study or our analytic as the means to attend to the problem it comes to represent. The point of my discussion is not to seek to dispense with critical realism or simply to expose its routines and ruses. I have been more interested in understanding the disciplinarity that founds it, and in reading this disciplinarity as both a consequence and figure of the political aspirations that underlie and over determine the field's self legitimating narratives, interpretive reflexes, theoretical itineraries, objects, priorities, and modes of redress. In short, the critical rationalities through which a field reproduces itself and confers authority on the practitioners who speak in its name. That such authority is both the outcome and measure of practices of governance born in the political desire, of course, to escape governmentality and the rule of institutional law altogether is not an indictment of academic projects that stand in historical, ideological, or narrative relation to social movements. It is not an indictment because the point here is not about forwarding an argument that reveals our normative routines in order to make a case for what would be better, right? I'm not trying to produce another progress narrative, as if the agency of out thinking everything that has made us is ours alone. I have wanted instead to inhabit not simply the hegemony of critical realism in women's studies, but what is made of me. Which is why I must acknowledge at such a late point here, of course, that the chapter carries its own field, forming hope that critical accounts of the field other than those staked to progress will come to be told, and that the dilemmas that accompany the demand for commensurability will be as compelling someday as the political promise the demand now holds. If in this revelation I enact precisely what I seek to discern, that is true, surely not beside the point, given that this chapter wants to take the power of our disciplinary belief in critical practice as seriously as we do, I mean, by this I'm trying to say that, you know, it's a gesture of always one of the gestures in the field is to point out that somebody enacts the very thing they're critiquing. And when we point that out, we think that we have somehow made a really important point, right? So that if Judith Butler can go, if you read Gender Trouble now, I'll give you the Butler. If you read Gender Trouble, most of those chapters take a critical set of thought, and especially a critical theorist, as far as she can before she feels that she runs into where their theory undoes itself according to whatever her political desire is that she's tracing in that chapter, Right? And it's at the moment where a lot of times she'll say that Foucault undoes himself by the contradiction in which he actually instantiates the very problem that he's trying to write himself out of. And it's at that moment, then, that we're taught our own projects begin, right? I mean, many times, just by showing that somebody is reiterating what. And I'm kind of interested in what it would mean to have critical practices that recognize that we can't not do that, that we're all going to actually repeat and reproduce the very thing that we see that shapes the critical practice that we're engaged in. And so pointing out when other people do it is not really doing a whole lot, other than a kind of ego management. No. And it's a fantasy of our own political agency in those moments. What I want to know is, why does the field teach us that that's part of what our. That's part of what we do. That's how we read, you know, and that's how we're supposed to write. Point out where somebody, in order to figure out how to correct the mistake that's been made. And that's the progress narrative in its most, you know, in its smallest, most everyday kind of idiom, is how it exists in how we read and how we write. So the last section, and I know this is getting long, so it's called and When Gender Fails. And I'm not going to read it because you all have been too great at listening to this so far, and it's longer than I wanted it to be, but what I do in this last section is just to say that, you know, gender, of course, will fail if it hasn't already failed, if it's, you know, to be adequate to the belief or the faith in it. I mean, even in Auslander, even as she's producing her hope, she marks its potent, the worries that she has, right? So that these turns to different Kind of critical capacities. And you can see it in a lot of ways. It's not just women to gender. It's from the national to the transnational. It's from the liberal to the neoliberal. Early on it was from modern to postmodern. I mean, there's ways in which the critical currency or the signature move or it's from Foucault, Gamben, right. I mean, it's from, you know, there are these moves which we then attach a great deal of political aspiration around their ability to resolve the political problems that we're tracing. So I'm very frustrated now with the way that the transnational is being evacuated of how it was early on used to now, you know, universities use it all the time. International, right? These terms that then can start to mean everything until they mean nothing. But what's interesting is the political desire that brings them into being and people wanting a critical practice that's going to be adequate to the failures of the one that came before. I totally understand that. I live with. I mean, I live within that political desire, right? To get out of and to escape the moment that we're in and to escape the incapacity of the present. Right. And it's. And the political emergency that we live in. What I'm trying to think about, without becoming anti theoretical, is the disciplinary apparatus, you know, within which that political desire is now institutionalized in identity knowledges and in the field especially of women and gender studies, you know, such that several generations of people are now being taught to read and write within that frame and to take critical practice as a political agency without the hard kind of conversations about what is the culture of the political that conditions critical practice today. You know, I mean, because one of the things Eva Chernowski has written about, and I think she's right, she got a new piece from the summer in Social Text called Neocitizenship that, you know, critique the pointing out ideology, critique, as it used to be called. But critique, pointing out the problem of an analysis, you know, even in the public sphere, let alone in the academic one, doesn't necessarily change the conditions by which people then proceed. That people have that the order of the political, political may be that people know, for instance in the US context that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but it does not change the course of events around that war. Right? So that knowing and the ability of the subject to know and to have a critical apparatus, all the years of trying to have criticality is not necessarily having a powerful aim in the order of the political as it is now structured. I have to think a lot more and do more writing about what that order of the political might be, the conditions of the political present. But I think that that's the challenge for us. I have two minutes. I'm just going to stop there and let you ask me questions about this. And thank you for listen.
